The Surprising Benefit of Upgrading Your Manual Lone Worker Protection
Organisations take the decision to invest in something either because they have to, or they want to. They’re spending money either to fix a problem, or to capitalise on what they see as an opportunity. In this last post in a series of 6 posts on manual processes to protect your lone workers, we look at the surprising benefit of upgrading these processes from manual to automated, thanks to the leveraging power of technology.
What we’re talking about here is a mind-set shift. Most organisations view risk assessments, compliance and a duty of care as things they have to do, because it’s enshrined in legislation. The shift occurs when organisations start thinking about how they can approach lone worker monitoring, alerting and communications as ways to increase their revenues, reduce their costs, progress their organisation and make it better. Technology and experience combine to deliver the answer.
Organisational Productivity Gains
So, here it is, the surprising benefit of letting technology take care of your lone worker protection. You’re not increasing your costs, or your time, or your effort. You’re increasing your productivity, and it works on two levels: the organisational and the personal.
Organisational productivity is about getting more done at less expense, or using fewer resources. It’s about finding new ways of doing things that improve processes, increase output, save time and reduce costs. Organisations are increasingly turning to technology and automation to do routine, repetitive things more quickly, accurately and cost effectively than people can. Lone worker protection is no different.
Taking a technology approach, in the form of advanced lone worker devices and monitoring, alerting and communications software, enables organisations to respond instantly to problems and reduce operational downtime. It also gives lone workers the safety net and confidence they need to maximise their own productivity. Organisations can see when problems occur, who responded to them, how quickly, how and when they resolved the issue, and what the resolution was, so that they can make adjustments and improve their processes.
There’s another benefit above knowing where your lone workers are, when they’re there, and that they’re safe. Automation enables you to deploy your resources much more effectively, because of the increased visibility into your operations. One Isle Systems customer was able to double their productivity by being able to send fully protected lone workers to investigate issues when before they had to send pairs of workers or even small teams.
Personal Productivity Gains
Most people in charge of their staff’s health and safety don’t have anywhere near enough hours in the day. There’s simply too much to do, they have too many responsibilities. The buck stops with them so they have to focus on what is essential or necessary. Inevitably that boils down to fire-fighting, sorting out problems, and dealing with the urgent rather than the important. Even if opportunities to make things better come on their radar, they often don’t have the time to fully investigate them. Does that sound like you?
Complexity is the enemy of productivity, and it’s often the case that you might have multiple systems in place, from different suppliers, for different lone workers with different device requirements. This means different systems to monitor and use, different suppliers to deal with, and a raft of ‘he said, she said’ negotiations to resolve when a problem occurs and every third party is blaming another link in the chain.
Centralising your lone worker processes through automation means that you have one place for managing your monitoring, alerting, communications, auditing and reporting. It also means that you have one supplier and one set of contractual documents to deal with. With no staff to manage in this area of your business, and with the system taking care of things for you, you win back more time in the day to get the other tasks off your desk.
What’s more, there are systems like ours which can also bring together your building alarms and your process control sensors into the same window, so that you’re further simplifying your working practices.
Safeguarding the wellbeing of your lone workers is a necessity, but it’s also an opportunity. Upgrading the manual procedures for protecting your lone workers into automated approaches reduces your risk, increases your productivity and gives you peace of mind. You’re keeping your key people safe, you’re profiting the organisation, and you’re freeing yourself up to get stuff done.
Talk to us about upgrading your manual processes for protecting your lone workers.
